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Thursday, 24 November 2016

Did the Daily Mail just try to blame immigrants for the Jo Cox killing?

Thomas Mair, the right-wing "Britain First" yelling white supremacist who killed Jo Cox refused to talk in police interviews, then he refused to enter a plea or give evidence in his trial.

This cowardly refusal to explain himself hasn't left many people in doubt about his motivations. The masses of extreme-right propaganda in his house, his associations with extreme-right political groups, the fact that he gave his name as "Death to traitors, freedom for Britain" on the one occasion he did decide to speak ... These things all point to a man so filled with right-wing hate that he decided to plot and execute the assassination of a local MP to prove some kind of political point.

It's difficult to have any sympathy with a person so filled with hate that they consider the murder of their political opponents to be a legitimate tactic. It's also very difficult to have any sympathy with a person who is so much of a coward that they're unwilling to explain their actions, and just sit there in silence pretending that they're the victim.

Apparently Mair had been the single occupier of a three bedroom council house ever since his grandmother died in 1996. The Daily Mail theory goes that Mair had been asked by the local council to consider downsizing to a smaller property, he got enraged that immigrants were going to steal his house, then he went out and killed Jo Cox because she wouldn't help him.

This appalling attempt to blame Mair's actions on immigrants, and on Jo Cox herself, is extraordinary, even by the Daily Mail's utterly disgusting standards.

The Daily Mail totally failed to provide a single shred of evidence that Mair had ever approached Jo Cox for help with his council house situation (if he had had previous contact with the MP I'm pretty sure it would have come out during the trial).

Mair is too much of a coward to explain himself, but the evidence paints a picture of a right-wing extremist who had been determined to carry out a politically motivated attack since the 1990s. The fact that the local MP Jo Cox supported Remain while his extreme-right buddies (like the Britain First Northern Brigade) repeatedly described Remain supporters as "traitors" was apparently enough to trigger his violent urges.

One of the most disgusting things about it is that under normal circumstances the Daily Mail would undeniably be stoking hatred against an unemployed person under-occupying a council house. But somehow in the case of a murderous neo-Nazi they're suddenly so full of concern about him that they're prepared to completely fabricate a story that he approached his murder victim for help to protect him from the immigrants who were trying to steal his house, and that she turned a blind eye to him.

Imagine the sickening mentality of people who would sympathise with a white supremacist killer and attempt to shift the blame onto his victim with an invented story about how she refused to help protect him from immigrant bogeymen.

The Daily Mail is an very harmful extreme-right propaganda rag owned by a tax-dodging billionaire called Jonathan Harmsworth. Don't read it and don't let anyone you love read it (if you can convince them to stop you'd be doing them a big favour).